Apple Says Exploits Released In “Dark Matter” Dump Are Outdated

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Apple Says Exploits Released In “Dark Matter” Dump Are Outdated

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Although much was made about a new batch of iPhone and MacBook flaws disclosed by WikiLeaks on Thursday, Apple says the issues appear to all be old, since-fixed vulnerabilities.

Yesterday WikiLeaks published the second batch of its Vault 7 documents, “Dark Matter,” revealing information about Apple-related hacks used by the CIA. This time around, the documents focus on hacks for MacBooks and iPhones, and comes two weeks after the initial batch of documents came to light.

Apple previously said that it had addressed “many of the issues” from the first Vault 7 leaks, and now the company has said much the same regarding the second batch. Despite promises from Julian Assange, it seems that WikiLeaks has not been in contact with Apple to provide further details about the exposed vulnerabilities.

“We have preliminarily assessed the WikiLeaks disclosures from this morning. Based on our initial analysis, the alleged iPhone vulnerability affected iPhone 3G only and was fixed in 2009 when iPhone 3G was released. Additionally, our preliminarily assessment shows the alleged Mac vulnerabilities were previously fixed in all Macs launched after 2013,” Apple told TechCrunch.

“We are tireless defenders of our users’ security and privacy, but we do not condone theft or coordinate with those that threaten to harm our users,” the tech giant added.

Yesterday’s WikiLeaks dump is part of the so-called “Vault 7” document stash. Initial disclosures were leaked earlier this month and detail a number of exploits affecting a wide range of hardware platforms.

The first document hoard contained thousands of files and revealed 14 iOS intrusion methods ranging from basic surveillance to remote device command and control. Like yesterday’s release, Apple analyzed the previous batch of exploits and confirmed “many” had already been patched.